


A true Holmes

by Sapphy, SapphyWatchesYouSleep (Sapphy)



Series: Becoming Sherlock Holmes [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Character Study, Childhood, Drabble, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-27
Updated: 2011-07-27
Packaged: 2017-10-21 20:15:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/229307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/Sapphy, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/SapphyWatchesYouSleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I got to wondering what sort of people could possible have created Sherlock and Mycroft. This little character study is my take.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A true Holmes

**Author's Note:**

> This story feels a touch unfinnished, but that's where it wanted to end so I let it.
> 
> I have no idea why I named Mummy Holmes Leticia, it just came to me.
> 
> Unfortunately not beta'd, and I am dyslexic, but Windows spell checker says it's okay.

It was not the sort of thing one was supposed to admit, she knew, but Leticia had never expected to love her children. She had hoped of course that they would be like her, but she knew that probability was on the side of them turning out like their father. Not that he was a bad man, just a dull one.

She wasn’t entirely sure why she’d married George. She knew herself to be incapable of loving those who weren’t her own kind, and she had no interest in sex, but all her contemporaries had all been getting married and she’d had enough of being an odd one out. So when George had proposed in a boat on the river Isis, she’d accepted. She didn’t object to George particularly, she was even fond of him, in her way. He treated her well and he was more interested than most normals in her beloved quantum mathematics. He accepted her little quirks, as he called them, and agreed that they should get a nanny rather than her leave her work to raise little Mycroft when he was born. He even let her give him a double barrelled surname, in the hope that he would turn out to be a true Holmes, not a dull Douglas like his father.

It wasn’t until he was three that she began to really hope that she might one day be able to love little Mycroft. She had tripped over him in the garden, sitting on the ground in the mud, his podgy toddler legs sticking straight out before him, carefully crushing the skeleton of a dead blackbird to dust with a wooden building block and collecting the powder in the blue plastic bucket George had bought him in Scarborough the year before.

She had knelt down beside him in the mud, and for the first time since his birth, found herself genuinely interested in the child.

“Why are you crushing that bird?” she’d asked, careful not to disturb his fierce concentration.

“I tried with a sheep head the gard’ner found inna field,” the child explained, in the gabbled English of a young child whose vocabulary has expanded unusually fast. “It was too hard. Then I found this bird.” He prodded the remains of the bird with a fat finger.

“Was it just a skeleton when you found it?” she asked.

“Nearly. I cleaned the meat and the maggots of the bones with one of the cooks scrubbing brushes.”

Leticia made a mental note to buy a new set of cleaning things for the kitchen staff.

“And once you’ve crushed it, what are you going to do with it?” she asked, intrigued by the quiet patient way the boy described what he was doing as though it should all be obvious.

“Mix it with water and salt and cook it,” he told her. “Water and salt and flour is all you need to make ru-di-mentry bread, it says so in my book ‘bout Africa.”

“Why are you making it into bread?”

“Because in the book nanny reads to me, there’s a giant who wants to grind up human bones to make bread. And when I asked why nanny said it was because he was a wicked monster. But giants are just big people and ordinary people don’t make bread out of bones but if you can its silly not to because when you’ve eaten meats there’s always bones left over, so I thought I’d try it and find out.”

She was so thrilled that her little boy aged three was already conducting experiments, that she abandoned her work and spent the afternoon helping him to form the ground bones into neat little patties and then bake them in the nursery fire. She even came and visited him in bed the next day when the rotten bird meat caught up with him and he was horribly sick. She bought him a book about the greatest mathematicians throughout history. The nurse tutted and said it was much too old for him, even if he was a bright little chap, but Mycroft accepted the book solemnly and asked her to bring him his dictionary so he’d know what the hard words meant.

They became very close over the next few years, and she came to love him in a way she hadn’t known she was capable of. Not only was he one of her own kind, someone who thought like her, who understood real logic, but he was also her son, flesh of her flesh, and she found to her surprise that that actually made a difference.

When Mycroft was five she bought a little blackboard and drew a neat grid for the days of the week on it. Nanny Grayling, stupid woman, thought the little stars she drew on it were for good behaviour. Only she and Mycroft knew that it wasn’t good behaviour she rewarded with book and puzzles and trips to the science museum, it was normal behaviour. Managing to blend in, to not let his teachers and school mates know he was different.

She had tried simply explaining to Mycroft that it would be easier for him if he just pretended to be ordinary around the normals, but with the impeccable logic of a child, he’d asked what was in it for him. She knew he wouldn’t understand yet the benefits of not being bullied, not being hated and resented, or not being thought a freak, so she’d made him his little chart.

He grandfather, the last true Holmes in the family, had told her once that their kind all had a gift and an obsession. Mycroft’s gift, she had discovered early on, was an uncanny ability to spot lies. Generally she thought his gift more useful, if less interesting, than her own of being able to see the colours and patterns made by numbers.

His obsession she discovered three months into his first term at school, when she asked him how it was he got such excellent reports when she knew him to have absolutely no interest in most of the work. He tried hard in maths, to please her, and he was naturally good with words, but generally he thought school horribly tedious and avoided doing any work if possible. He was a lazy little thing.

He explained, quite calmly, in English that still wasn’t as clear as the other children’s, but with the vocabulary of someone twice his age, that he was blackmailing his teacher.

“Why?” she’d asked, not out of any moral objections – the teacher was a stupid woman who called her brilliant son a ‘rather slow little chap’ – but confusion as to why he’d gone to the effort. “Surely,” she’d asked, “you know I don’t care about your grades?”

He’d and agreed that he did know that. He did it he said, not because he wanted good reports, but because he wanted to control his teacher. He wanted power. That was when she realised what his obsession was going to be. The next day she’d bought him a book on politics.

George did his best to understand Mycroft, but he was a normal and Mycroft a true Holmes. They might as well have been two different species. She wasn’t particularly surprised when he began talking about having another child. They could afford it, and nanny hadn’t much to do now Mycroft was eight and running his primary school like a miniature tsar, so she’d agreed.

Two months after Mycroft’s ninth birthday little Sherlock had been born.

She had taken more of an interest in her second son’s baby years, looking for some sign that he too was one of them, and kindred spirit for her and Mycroft.

Her elder son had, initially, been excited by the idea of a younger sibling, but had soon gone off the idea when he realised it would be years before the poor child understood enough to do what Mycroft commanded.

All in all she thought this second child even more dull than the first had been in his early years. He learnt to walk quickly, but he was four before he learnt to read and he didn’t say a single word until the end of his first day of school. She’d gone herself, rather than send the nanny, to collect her two boys from the local prep school. Mycroft had chatted happily on the way home about how he finally had enough dirt on the chairman of the board to get the governors to change the curriculum, but in a lull in his conversation, she’d asked Sherlock what he thought of school, not really expecting her thus far mute child to answer. He thought for a minute and then said, to her surprise, “Terribly dull. I don’t think I’ll go again.”

Once he’d begun talking it proved even harder to get him to stop than Mycroft, who had at least begun to learn the usefulness of a pointed silence in persuading people to reveal their secrets too him.

It had taken her far longer to discover his gift and obsession, despite his garrulousness.

His gift, she eventually realised, was an ability to see connections, especially between events. It was he told her that the cook was the one stealing the silverware. If she’d outright denied it to Mycroft he’d have seen the lie straight away, but he wasn’t interested enough to question her. It was little Sherlock, aged seven, who’d seen the connection between the cooks new shoes and the disappearance of the Douglas family silver (which they three non-Douglass’ privately agreed was hideous).

The reason she didn’t know what his obsession was, she realised quickly, was that he didn’t know. She wept for him, when she knew no one would see her, because a Holmes without an obsession was like a normal without a heart. Obsession was what kept them going, what kept them from despairing of the dull dull world they were trapped in, and worst of all, of hating their dull limited bodies.

Sherlock did badly in school, mostly to annoy Mycroft, who had learn that good grades bring a certain kind of power with them, and now studied as hard as his natural laziness would permit.

Despite her protestations George insisted on the boys going to a boarding school as soon as they were eleven. Though having them out of the house allowed her to give more time to her equations than she had since Mycroft was three, she found she missed them terribly, and worried about them even more.  
How where they to cope, surrounded night and day by normals, without her to gently guide them towards acceptable behaviour?

Mycroft, being Mycroft, did admirably. It took him most a of year, but he got the school running just the way he liked it, and even added extra biology to the curriculum when Sherlock started, as a kind of welcoming gift. It wasn’t his true obsession, but Sherlock loved biology, especially toxicology.

It was when he returned home for Easter in his first year that she was able to relax a little about him. He bought back with him a scrap-book filled with press cuttings about the death of a school boy swimming champion, Carl Powers. He showed them too her after dinner on that first night, as they sat on the terrace.

“Murder,” he said, almost reverently, as though saying a prayer. “The death of Carl Powers wasn’t an accident, it was murder.”

And then she knew. It was slightly disappointing that neither of her sons shared her obsession with maths, but she hadn’t really expected them too. It was worrying that both of them, but especially Sherlock, had chosen such dangerous obsessions, but at least Mycroft would always be able to find something to amuse himself with. She dreaded to think what Sherlock would do between cases.

The answer, she discovered when he was fifteen, was take increasingly hard drugs. All in all she felt it could have been worse. At least she knew his knowledge of toxicology was almost unparalleled. He wouldn’t overdose unless he really meant it.

She knew it would shock normal parents, but Mycroft was always her favourite. They understood each other, and he was capable of more real emotion than Sherlock. He made sure to always keep himself abreast of the latest developments in mathematics, no matter how busy he found himself, and she in turn began to take an interest in politics for the first time. Sherlock though needed more of her time and attention. He seemed to spend his life lurching from one crisis to another, quite unaware of the destruction he left behind him. Mycroft and Sherlock regarded one another, in a fairly friendly sort of way, as enemies. But despite their differenced the three of them were always united, three true Holmes’ in a world full of normals.

As the years went by the three of them grew increasingly distant from George. He was, as Mycroft put it with his signature understated eloquence, “a perfectly decent chap, but not one of us.” That summed it up rather well.

When George died, she didn’t realise it for three days. She wished she’d found him sooner, if only to lessen the cleaning bills, but she had struck upon an entirely new and far neater equation for the orbit of Jupiter, which a colleague in the astronomy department had asked her too look at.

She had sent a message to Mycroft straight away, then 28 and living in a very nice flat in Kensington and running most of military intelligence without their having noticed yet. She left it up to him to find and tell Sherlock – he’d always been better at locating his brother’s hiding places than her, and besides, he had the resources. She told Mycroft’s secretary to organise the funeral and when back to her study, confident that the nameless blonde woman Mycroft put so much trust in would organise everything and find her a suitable black dress.

Mycroft eventually located Sherlock the day before the funeral living under a bridge in Westminster, taking large amounts of heroin, with a male prostitute called Diamond who was teaching him how to seduce gay men over the age of thirty. He’d thought it might be a useful life skill.

When she’d been told this by Mycroft at the wake, she’d thought that it might perhaps mean Sherlock was actually interested in sex, unusual but not unheard of among true Holmes’. It would have been nice to know he wasn’t alone. She was rather relieved though when a week later he used all the skills Diamond had taught him to seduce a stock broker into admitting he’d strangled his ex-wife. She wouldn’t have been able to give him any advice on relationships.

After George’s death life seemed to just trickle along for the three of them. She took to publishing articles under three different pseudonyms because people were starting to get annoyed with her making all the great mathematical discoveries of their age. Mycroft secured his hold on the secret service securely enough that he could begin working on taking over the civil service. Sherlock made a website and got some work with a nice young inspector from Scotland yard, who seemed to regard Sherlock more as a wonder than a horror, and therefore got filed neatly under ally in Mycroft’s mental filing cabinet.  
Nothing much happened until the year Sherlock was 29. Mycroft came to see her wearing an expression that, for Mycroft, was one of excitement.

“I kidnapped a very interesting man yesterday,” he said, by way of introduction.

She gave him a quizzical look, half her brain still on calculations. After all, Mycroft though political intrigue was interesting.

“He’s Sherlock’s new flatmate.”

She carefully put the mental calculations to one side, to be returned to later.

“I hope you don’t want me to bet on how long this one will last?” she asked. “Gambling is mathematically foolish, and trying to predict anything your brother does is downright stupid.”

“Actually I wouldn’t like to put money on the length of his tenure either – I think this one might last.”

She raised a surprised eyebrow.

“He’s ex-army, a doctor, just invalided back from Afghanistan. So far he seems remarkably unfazed by Sherlock, given that he’s known him all of two days and Sherlock’s already persuaded him to examine a corpse and then abandoned him at the crime scene without any way of getting home.”

“That does sound like an admirable test of his metal. After all, if a person survives their first half an hour in Sherlock’s company then they generally manage to tolerate him long-term. It’s that initial shock that seems to be the problem.”

“And the fact that he lives surrounded by chaos. I really don’t know why Mrs Hudson continues to give him house room!”

Leticia looked distractedly around her own room, with its tottering piles of books and walls covered in her scribbling (she couldn’t always find paper). “He isn’t all that bad is he? I mean, he usually knows where things are and that what matters. But perhaps a military man will tidy him up a bit. What’s his name?”

“Watson. Dr John H Watson.”


End file.
